Year: 2005

One of my themes is the ubiquitiy of internet communications makes ideas, particularly the ones that are easy to grasp, which re-inforce “consipracy theories” or otherwise prey on human fears, spread like wildfire, like viruses, like memes in fact.

This news story is about hoax blogs spreading ideas (ironically, about the spread of biological viruses) like viruses. One of the things I’ve said many times the “information model” used to structure web information needs to be sensitive to irony, satire and other “non-truthful” intents of those posting the information. As if.

I’ve remarked before how amazing I find Google’s indexing of little old me’s blog. I thought it particularly remarkable since I shifted away from Google owned Blogger to WordPress (for categorisation capabilities, that I’ve not yet exploited !) without actually giving the Google indexing issue a second thought. As far as I can tell the full text of my whole five years blogging is indexed, even in the new page URL’s that didn’t exist before June this year, as well as the old pages that remain on-line, and cached copies (of both) too.

This is particularly interesting, because this news story claims Google is only just about to initiate indexing of non-Blogger blogs, feed summaries initially, full text later.

I’ve been thinking about why I haven’t bothered to exploit the categorisation yet, despite making the move explicitly for that purpose. I guess I still have a lingering suspicion that the best categorisation is implicit in the organisation of page links, backed up by text searches. Well I never, who’da thought it ?

Well, well; I know and like some of Peter Drucker’s management writings, but I’d never noted his earlier philosophical works or his connection with the Vienna Circle. Someone I must research more closely.

How about this for a quote ..

“I couldn’t stand the ultra-rationality of my Uncle Hans.”

Instead, the young Drucker was attracted to Othmar Spann, the “Romantic” among the economists, whom he rates today as a “great sociologist, but a rather mediocre economist”

Following Google and Microsoft eBay just had to have their own telephone and messaging service. This time Skype are mentioned – they are the acquisition – for a mind-boggling $2.6bn !!

You can see why Skype would sell-out, but why would eBay want to spend that money for that capability ? I’m going to have to get into eBay – I’ve only browsed a couple of times so far – never caught the over-40’s habit yet.

Vint Cerf joins Google.

Usual “today US scientists claimed ….” story, but an interesting connection none-the-less, whatever the facts.

Interesting in “The End of Life as We Know it” (the final “Life” column from the Grauniad) “Don’t Dumb Me Down” bemoans popular media’s obsession with reporting scientific claims filtered by unscientific editing. “The media create a parody of science.” says Ben Goldacre of Bad Science. [via Ray Girvan].

I’ve been using the “every cloud has a silver lining” aphorism as part of the debate about whether MoQish “Dynamic Quality” has any necessarily positive directed change effect, suggesting it’s really just a case of every change is an opportunity for some positive evolution. Same as the general management cliche that every problem is really an opportunity.

This NYT article uses the same metaphor,

“Katrina was a natural disaster that interrupted a social disaster …. It has created as close to a blank slate as we get in human affairs, and given us a chance to rebuild a city that wasn’t working. We need to be realistic about how much we can actually change human behavior, but it would be a double tragedy if we didn’t take advantage of these unique circumstances to do something that could serve as a spur to antipoverty programs nationwide.”

“Blank Slate” in there too. Metaphors R us. Interestingly it was the subject of Katrina that most recently provided the “silver lining” opportunity on MoQ-Discuss too.

Not read this yet. Thanks to Will Wilkinson for the link.

Worth reading, for Dennett’s writing style. Nice non-committal reference to the Cold Fusion case, as other scientists rushed to prove / disprove. He concludes with

“Since there is no content [in Intelligent Design Creationism], there is no “controversy” to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?”

I agree, what is much more interesting is how the acceptance of ideas like IDC spread through a culture.

Referenced this work several times previously, but picked-up this neat summary thanks to a search cross-hit.

Post from Jorn about disaster response planning (also referring to the HuffPo post), which includes an important point for me about hindsight, and reliable ways of spotting vulnerabilities that need to be addressed in advance.

He says “I suspect the skill that this sort of foresight requires is rare and unfamiliar to most people, and especially to bureaucrats. It seems to me much more like the novelist’s skill …”

Hear, hear. Archetypal “bureaucrats” deal in logic and facts, whereas the world really deals in quality.